This Land Is Your Land. This Land Is My Land.

For sake of clarity, we want to reiterate our purpose for moving here.

There are 800 languages spoken in the tiny country of Papua New Guinea, making it the most linguistically diverse country in the world. The vast majority of the people here have never heard the Gospel in their mother tongue and do not have the Scriptures in their language. The Gеnde people fall into this category. New Tribes Mission estimates there are 10,000 individuals in the Gеnde people group. We are currently beginning the process of moving into the small Gеnde community of Emеgari, where we’ll live among the people as they teach us their language and culture. Lord willing, a few years after moving in, we’ll be able to begin literacy classes to teach the people how to read and write their own language. Next, we’ll begin to teach chronologically through the Scriptures from eternity to eternity. If God calls people to himself and establishes a church, we will work to disciple the believers to maturity while translating the Scriptures into the Gеnde language.

The end goal of our ministry is to see believers from many villages of the Gеnde people who can live faithfully for the Lord, train their children in the way of the Lord, interpret and preach the Word clearly and to see indigenous churches that can function independently without direct missionary involvement.

The Gеnde church plant is what our organization terms an existing work. That means outreach to the Gеnde people has begun, but because of the vast scope of the work, it was unable to be finished by the first missionary team. After thirty years of dedicated work, the last couple recently retired.

Watch this video on the history of the Gеnde work and how our team was re-invited by the Gеnde people in a new village to continue the work.

We will be moving into the bush village of Emеgari with two other families: the Sanfords and the Fitzpatricks. Meet them here.

Before we can move in though, we need to build our house! The Gеnde people are spread out across the steep mountains in the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. Many villages are inaccessible by road and even airplane. It will take many helicopter slingloads and many long hours of work for Nate along with a missionary build team and the Gеnde people before our family is able to move in. Because of the expenses of off grid living, it will cost around $65,000 to build our bush house. But praise the Lord, God has already provided much of the cost! Thanks to many of you and your faithful donations over the years, we’ve already been able to purchase $30,000 worth of our needed materials. We also were generously gifted $2,000 from a church’s VBS missions offering recently. That means we just need to raise $33,000!

If you would like to contribute to the remaining amount needed, we'll be launching a fundraiser soon!

Here’s a picture of the $30,000 worth of materials that we’ve purchased over the last few years from your giving. They’ve been patiently waiting in storage while we prayed for a team and a people group.

Over these next few weeks, we’ll be meeting with our aviation program, tech services department and build team to map out the allocation process to Gеnde for the next several months. Nate will be spending a lot of time prepping materials and building in the bush, so we’ll be spending a good chunk of the next few months apart. Please pray for our family as this will be a stressful season. Pray that God will make us ready for this task in front of us. For a long time it’s seemed impossibly far away and now that it’s here it’s exciting but quite daunting. “Who is equal to such a task?” (Paul in 2 Corinthians 2:16).

Last month we had a super encouraging visit from Nate’s mom, sister, and older brother and his son. It was really sweet to have them stay with us for almost two weeks and share Papua New Guinea with them. They were also able to take a trip into Emеgari and meet our new Emеgari family! It was a revitalizing visit and was a great precursor to the stress of house building. If you contributed to the costs of their trip over here, thank you from the bottom of our hearts.

Here are some pictures from our time together: